lowquality.net » Musician / Geek

As of late, I’ve been really aware of two great weaknesses in my playing. The first is no great surprise: I’m a terrible soloist. I am still relatively new to the idea. I think most bass players come to the soloing game late and I am no exception. I feel like I have most of the pieces but I just don’t know how to put them together yet. Even over a simple blue progression I don’t feel like my solos really work. Even when they don’t sound like crap they still feel very forced, there’s always that limbo gray area between playing something more melodic and (maybe) higher up the fretboard, or something that sounds more like a busy bass line.

The other weakness is something that contributes to my shortcomings as a soloist: I struggle with keeping the form of tunes. In some ways I am being pretty hard on myself because the songs which I struggle with most on are songs I don’t really know that well or haven’t been playing very long, which is a logical excuse for not knowing the form that well. I guess my complaint is that I can’t digest the songs as quickly as I would like to. I really want to be able to follow the form of a chord progression a few times and being able lock into it in such a way that I am able to really play music and not wonder if I am playing the right chord at the right time.

And again, I make these complaints knowing that I am probably not as bad as I think I am, but I know I am not at the standard held by the people I play with– whether they say it to my face or not– and that is the reason we always should play with musicians who are better than us, you always have that carrot danging in front of you that you may never get to taste, but it keeps you moving in a direction.

So, I’ve been ruminating on these issues and also on the fact that I just don’t have the time in my real life to sit down for several hours and work these issues out the best possible way. Sure I could spend hours and hours transcribing great soloists but that kind of academic approach is really something I want to get away from– and I just don’t have the time for it. I want a more pragmatic solution that acts almost as an mantra to help me focus on my weaknesses. Like I said, I feel like I have the tools required to do what I need to do, it’s a matter of focus. How to focus and what exactly to focus on?

What I really yearn for with realizing these shortcomings is a broader and more experienced repertoire. I simply don’t know enough songs, and I know hardly any melodies to songs. That’s really the key, and I know it. I’ve KNOWN it for years. All that time with Whit Browne hammering into me to learn the bass lines and melodies of standards before I could solo over them.. all of that time knowing what I should do and not consistently applying it. How can I play a meaningful solo– an improvised melody over the changes of a song– if I don’t know the melody of the song I am playing? How can follow the form of a song if I am thinking about it as arbitrary chord changes and not chords which support and empower the only part of the song people in the audience really know they are aware of? I have to learn more melodies to the songs I play, even if I never play them myself and even if my solos are nothing but me reinterpreting the melody on the bass.

Today I learned of the death of one of my high school teachers whom, over the years, has inspired me quite a bit as a musician and also as a music teacher. I hadn’t been in touch with him much, but I’d talked to him within the last few years when we were both teaching at the Governor’s School for The Arts– a job which he helped me to get. I wasn’t close enough to him at this point that I feel personally saddened by his passing, but I am rocked by the overall idea that someone so large in his reach and span of influence can die so young and so suddenly like any “common” person. Robert Brown will be missed by so many people, and the people who would have normally come into his sphere of influence via the GSA will be ignorant as to the experience they are missing out on. Robert was truly a fantastic teacher who worked his tail off selflessly for no other reason than his love of music and teaching.

On this same day a friend from college happened to post this video on facebook of Tom Waits reading an uncharacteristically positive poem by Charles Bukowski called The Laughing Heart and I can’t help but foolishly draw cosmic connections between the two events as this would very much be the kind of pep talk Robert might give. “Why are you hiding?” was his regular question to me. I ask my students, and myself, this question quite often.

The Laughing Heart

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

- Charles Bukowski

R.I.P. Mr. Brown

I am blessed by having so many close friends that do music either as a profession or as a large and important part of their lives, since it gives me a bit more perspective beyond what my own experiences with music are. All of these people do something a little bit different from one another, be it composing, performing, teaching, recording or some combination of the four and involving a variety of different instruments. While I believe that every artist is on a quest for truth to some degree, what makes art (especially music) so fantastic is that the truth is completely relative to each individual listener, the performer, the composer and to each given performance. Everyone has their own vision and that vision changes during every performance (or session, or lesson, or composition). Music is liberated by not having the need for a finished product. Sure we have technology to help us create a finished products, but music isn’t dependent on it in the way that, say, painting or sculpting is. A finished score is only one definite variable from the many that will go into the performance of the piece. This indefinite characteristic has always been something that fascinates (and terrifies) me. Two performances from the same combo, of the same song, in the same venue, can sound completely different and come across in a very different way to the same exact audience. For me, music just isn’t real unless its a performing situation, working with an audience. Composing feels too isolated and lonely. Teaching, while fruitful and enjoyable, doesn’t scratch the itch. Recording sessions are lots of fun but still a very different animal from living in the moment on stage.

Every Wednesday I help Billy Thompson host a blues open mic out at JM Randall’s in Williamsburg and its always a good time (its an open jam so there’s an even wider array of variables at play). It is nice to have a paying gig in the middle of the week that I can get a little extra income from and its always a blast to play with Billy and Jim (when Jim isn’t playing with someone else). I went to bed at 2AM last night and awoke invigorated at 6:30AM.  I feel invigorated because, for a few late hours, in the middle of the night, music (and life) seems real to me in a way that sitting in an office can never feel and I come home exhausted with a pile of stories to tell my wife  over breakfast concerning the kinds of crazy people that go out to a blues bar to get inebriated at 1AM on a Wednesday night. Not an especially golden performance, but a gig none the less. It scratches that itch and gets all of the awful crap that builds up inside me out and gone for awhile, which is a good thing to have in the middle of the week.

The  reaction some have when hearing that I drive out for an hour on a weeknight to go play with a handful of open mic cats and entertain the kind of dregs that like to get blind-stinking drunk on said weeknight, only to drive back home so I can go to bed around 2AM with a little extra money in my pocket and then get up for my day gig at 6:15AM, is that its the most miserable thing ever. At the very least, it doesn’t seem worth it to a lot of folks and I guess, for some people, it isn’t worth it. I don’t have the busiest gig schedule right now, so it’s not a big deal to me. For some of my friends who do music as a full-time job, stuff like this is an everyday thing. Drive three hours to get to a place to play for an hour, load in your gear, play the show, unload, fight with someone about money, and drive back for three hours. Even if you make a little more than you need to cover gas money, the time spent never quite works out to being worth it from a conventional $/hr perspective. But, you never question that– well that’s not entirely true, you DO question it. Actually, you question it all of the time. That whole time you are sitting in the car driving, or toiling away over a composition that may never get played by musicians (let alone heard by an audience) or sitting in the back of a music store teaching some snot-nosed little shit who never practices, you are wondering what the fucking point to all of this hustling is and you hope that it is all going to work out for some greater end.  These thoughts cross my my own mind far less than now than they once did and plague me not nearly as often as they do some of my colleagues, but I still have them.

In the end, musicians do this crap because they can’t imagine not doing it. Well, in my case, I can imagine myself not doing music because, for some time, I wasn’t playing much and I had grown so accustomed to how miserable I had become that I thought that it was just the way I was supposed to feel all of the time. Despite all of the rough shit that goes along with playing in bands you do it all for the few moments you get to be on stage. Every gig I’ve ever played felt like a big waste of time right up until the downbeat of the first song of the first set. It all comes together right there and feels totally worth it. I can’t explain it any deeper than that. If you are a musician or an artist, you know what its like to exist in these two worlds: there’s Their world, which is where all of that pointless drudgery and hard work exists; where you get stiffed on the bar tab and a flat tire on the way to show. And then, there’s Our world, where the art exists which makes it all worthwhile. As soon as you cross into the world inhabited by your fellow bandmates, the other world seems so far away. The only drag is not getting to spend as much time in that world as I would like, but the good news is that time hardly exists in that world and a little goes a long way.

It’s not all  pop philosophy and nonsense, though, it’s good to get paid to play music. Actually, it feels damned good to get paid to play. Whenever you meet some guy who says he’s “above playing in a cover band” or “would never be a sideman for someone like [insert name of vapid pop star]” he’s saying that shit because the reality of being poor slob who lives in the real world and has the fucking blessed ability to make a few bucks playing music to avoid a schleppy job dealing with “normals” has not set in. Musicians should never take for granted the fact that they can do something that very few other people can do (and which even fewer people can do well), and which the end result is a valuable asset in many people’s eyes. They will pay you for making them feel good. They are living in the same tough-ass world the rest of us are, but they lack the passport to that world that we have. Don’t feel cheap for accepting money for making people feel good; you aren’t a sellout and you aren’t cheapening your craft by accepting payment for it. Maybe music isn’t my main source of income, but there is always some bullshit necessitous thing that, as adults, we have to spend money on in order to get through life (in my near future: new tires) and it’s so great to be able to say “I bought this with music.”

So, I guess I’ll end this rumination with a shameless plug: I have a new feature on the site that will keep you updated to my appearances. It has a seperate RSS feed from the regular site which is a cool function and has allowed me to publish any upcoming dates directly to Facebook automagically using the RSS app built into Facebook’s “Wall” (but gigpress forced me to remove the feedburner plugin so you will have to resubscribe to my site in your RSS reader in order to receive updates)

Anyway, right now, most of these dates are with Billy Thompson but there may be some other stuff on the horizon.

If you want to give Billy’s music a listen go to: myspace.com/billythompsonandfriends

The last couple of albums have been on the shady side, but this is the reason I still try to go see Galactic when I have the opportunity.

Last week Busch Gardens Europe announced the closing of the Big Bad Wolf roller coaster after 25 years of service after Labor Day of this year. The primary reason given has been that the Big Bad Wolf has “reached the end of it’s service life.”

Pretty lame excuse right?

Even Busch Garden’s powers-that-be have more or less stated that they really intend to close the Wolf it is to make room for something else (but haven’t announced what, yet). In the past they’ve had no problem with dropping a new coaster in somewhere and calling it a day (and please note that the former Drachen Fire site is still unpopulated with a new ride). The Wolf’s age is a bogus excuse when you consider that it is only 25 years old. The Loch Ness Monster is older and there’s several notably older coasters in the world: The Coney Island Cyclone has been going since the 1920’s and its made of wood (not to mention the only relic of Astroland still standing). The excuse given on the FAQ tries to throw some kind of technical curve ball involving “ride dynamics” and maintenance costs.

So, yeah, I am sort of skeptical. The Wolf is, for many people who have grown up in Hampton Roads, the first roller coaster we ever road, if no other reason than because the height requirement was less strict than the Loch Ness Monster or any of the other coasters in the park. So, with that in mind I half believe that this might be some kind of ploy to get some nostalgic visitors in the park to ride the Wolf one last time and, then, sometime in the Fall, announce that due to an overwhelming protest, the Wolf has been spared when they had no intentions of closing it at all.

But I’d more confidently wager that Busch Gardens just wants a new coaster but their new bosses (InBev) are making them cut back on overall maintenance costs so they have to axe one of the older, lamer and more costly rides to make room in the annual budget for something else. Last year, when InBev acquired Annheiser-Busch it was apparent that they weren’t positive about keeping the company’s non-beverage related assets and that cost-cutting was a priority in every aspect of the acquisition.

I’m sure the Busch Gardens and Sea World execs are keeping real quiet this Summer for fear of being turned into a Six Flags. It looks like they also have plans for a Christmas season this year, so they are probably trying to maximize Busch Gardens’ profit margin however they can. Won’t be surprised if we look back on the closing of the Big Bad Wolf as the beginning of the end of Busch Gardens Williamsburg.

Nevertheless, I don’t really think I’ll miss the Big Bad Wolf. At first I thought I would, but I don’t think I will. I ride it almost every time I go to the park and I always wonder why I bothered waiting in line for so damn long.

I was sent this video by boxedcity.com/757/ with the challenge of reflecting on what this speech says about 757. I think the general design theory presented by James Knustler says a lot about how so many of my friends who’ve lived in Hampton Roads most of their lives simply feeling unwelcome and uninterested in their own city.  The Seven Cities still hemorrhage their youth out to other cities and states every year and I think some of what Knustler touches on is at least one indication of why: “These are places not worth caring about.”

There was a time when I had conversations like this with Tom all of the time. This is one of the few to not end with any reference to Davy Havok or Rambo.

Tom: damn, miles is killin

Justin: miles who?

Tom: yes miles who

Justin: well what fucking song is it?

Justin: how am I supposed to know what you are talking about?

Justin: you say “miles is killin” like the nigga’s zombie is playing trumpet in your house… which I could see as being a major benefit of living on the 1st floor in Harlem

Tom: that is the best quote of all time

Tom: i can’t breathe because I am crying

Tom: hahaha

Tom: zombie

Tom: hahaha

Tom: with like a ratty ass old brooks brothers suit…. just a skeleton

Justin: and he’d be all pissed off because his skeleton would be white

Tom: hahah

1. Last night I intended to go jam with my pal Tripp at a shady storage building in Wards Corner and because of some confusion with pad locks and keys, we ended up at someone’s house in Virginia Beach at the most ridiculous home studio I have ever seen. It was as big or bigger than some legit commercial studios I have been in and every damn thing you’d expect to find in one. Crazy.One of my reason for wanting to get together with Tripp was an excuse to crank the AG 500 up with both of my cabinets and mess with it a little to get some different sounds (which I haven’t had the opportunity to do because I have only been using it at gigs and don’t have much of an opportunity to experiment with it at full volume). So instead of doing this in a rattling storage building, I got to do it in a more harmonically-friendly environment. This fucking amp is so awesome for a 26lbs. flyweight head. I got the distortion channel dialed in perfect right now, but it really needs to be cranked to get the right amount of “good” feedback. So freaking fun.
2. May have another gig with Billy Thompson coming up. I love playing with Billy, so I am super stoked. Will keep everyone posted about that.
3. Luke told me yesterday that he and Sarah are pregnant!
4. Going to Richmond this weekend to hang out with Kab Kids. I expect to be drunk-tweeting much of the hangout session. Also expect to sneak away at some point and hit Plan 9 for some tunes.
5. It’s retarded to love a grocery store this much, but I am so fucking glad we have a Trader Joe’s in Hampton Roads now. I could go there every day. I never get sick of it.

I know. I know.

Kim and I found this about a year ago and after almost that much time has passed we occasionally still catch ourselves singing it in our heads so we promised to never mention it again… but then it comes up in conversation and we get the hook stuck on “Repeat One” and we have to go back to rehab. My buddy DJ Cornbread discovered this for the first time yesterday and posted it to his Facebook.. thus cursing me to relive and sing this damned miserable excuse for a song in my head for the remainder of Eternity.

But, first, some thoughts:

1) No real woman who suspects her man is cheating wants to smell his dick. Period.

2) Any man who is knowingly dating / married to a woman crazy enough to request / write a song about the smelling of an unfaithful lover’s penis would be a fool to not shower and scrub himself mercilessly before leaving the hotel.

3) Despite being recorded before Barack Obama took office, this song single-handedly negates the coming of an age where an African-American can become President of the United States of America. It’s like he didn’t really win the election. It’s a relationship not unlike Christ dying for our sins, except with the opposite effect. This song forgives grace and innocence. If King were alive he’d turn the fire hoses on the crowds himself.

Second only to “not having to drive a car” I envy the convenient close-proximity of quality corporate food chains like Au Bon Pain that  Boston– or any major city– has to offer. (And that IS the rub when living in a major city: you want to wage wanton protest against corporate chains because you have local alternatives worth protecting– and you should protect them– but in cultural vacuums like Hampton Roads, Virginia we welcome Chipotle with open arms and don’t care if it puts a QDoba or Moe’s out of business. The irony is that you guys in the big cities still have so many more of these corporate chains than we do and, such as the case of Au Bon Pain, you forget how good some of them really are because they create the baseline of quality in your locale. I mean, I doubt anyone down here would even know what a Peet’s Coffee was, let alone Espresso Royale,)

Yeah, this is the post where Justin gushes over a chain restaurant.

I admit that it’s completely superficial, but a man like me needs an almond croissant from time to time, and when he lives in a shitty town like Norfolk, VA he knows he’s gonna end up driving for 30 minutes and paying too much at a mediocre pretentious hole-in-the-wall where the owner has some kind of inflated self-image as Ambassador of Food Culture to Hampton Roads because “he went to France once.”

Who cares? All I know is that an ABP almond croissant would be affordable and of decent quality by comparison to the current options in my neighborhood and I wouldn’t shed a tear if they opened one right over here on the dirty side of 21st street. Or, even, better.. next door to Local Heroes.

Au Bon Pain would blow the doors off of Panera Bread and 75% of the half-assed local “bistros.”

I know dick about electrical systems. Please advise.

When Kim and I moved into our apartment last May we knew that living in an older building was going to have some idiosyncracies that we’d not experienced in the past. The primary one for us has been that, especially during the summer when we have the AC units cranking, we are replacing our fuses quite often.

Last night we came home to a dark apartment well beyond the reasonable hour of being able to run to the hardware store to buy fuses (we have the round plug style fuses and I wasn’t about to go out at 3AM only to discover that Harris Teeter didn’t carry them). So we slept in a sweltering apartment all night and I woke up at the buttcrack of dawn and drove to Lowe’s to get some fuses.

Up until this moment, I’ve been replacing “like with like” without really knowing if the previous tenants knew what the hell they were doing. The orange 20 amp fuses at the top go to the kitchen and run the fridge (and something else, I don’t know what) and the rest are 15 amp fuses. For some reason I didn’t think to read the plate on the left because A) it contained a diagram that makes no sense to me and B) it seemed too old to be relevant to my interests. So I continued to blissfully replace 15 amp fuses with 15 amp fuses (this time I bought the Heavy duty versions) and 20-amp fuses with 20 amp fuses. Well today Kim points out that that the diagram says “30 Amp. Main”. I don’t know if that means that the main circuit is 30 amps, if the diagram is poorly designed and “30 Amp” is a separate idea from “Main,” which is referring to the diagram itself (possibly meaning that all of these circuits are 30 amps and the sign is telling me what kind of fuses to use), or some other interpretation of the facts presented on this sign which was made in the age before litigation. There was one occasion where the maintenance guy replaced a 15 amp fuse with a 20 amp fuse and I wasn’t sure if that was just some kind of shady, cheapskate slumlord thing to do or if 20 amp fuses were a perfectly ok thing to use. I have since replaced that fuse for safety’s sake because I didn’t want to die in a fire.

I really hope Ozzy is the first one to respond to this post.

Click for larger image

I can’t find my hat and I’m a freaking wreck over it. I know there are real problems in the world but I’ll be damned if they matter to me so long as I lost my hat. Back in 2005 I had expressed to Kim, who I’d only been dating for about a year or so, that I wanted to start wearing “an old man hat.” My reasons were simple: one, I thought a hat would be a good way to manage my otherwise unmanageable hair and, two, I hate the idea of wearing a ball cap so I figured a tweed cap would fit my grouchy old man personality. Also, there was a picture of me when I was kid dressed in a suit with a brown cap on my head and I thought it was funny and said something like “this is a place I’d like to get back to.”

That Christmas Kim gave me a hat she ordered online from a store in Scotland and it couldn’t have been more awesome. I think I’ve worn it nearly every day since then, rarely taking a break from having it on my head. It had become one my most cherished possessions… this dumb old man hat. Sometime around 2007, I started seeing these style of hats everywhere, I was ahead of the trend by a year and some change. Normally, being resistant to fads I could have been expected to toss it in the closet somewhere, but that didn’t happen. I was expecting to keep this stupid hat for years to come.

Now I have no idea where the hell it is. I’ve looked everywhere and I can’t find it. Kim keeps saying we can get me a new one, and I have even found some nice places that hand tailor tweed caps to order but I honestly just want my hat back. I’m like a little kid whose security blanket has been snatched away. I’m like Linus going through the DTs, my head spinning, getting dizzy and sick and unable to function as a normal human being.

I really would love for them to come stateside, but if they never do I am just glad that they are doing something.

It isn’t typically my style to hotlink webcomics but if this isn’t just the perfect expression of how I, and so many of my friends, view their love-hate-love relationship with the internet.

I only tend to blog when things are wrong or when I am feeling snarky and that’s just not the way it should be.

Ten things:

1. Turning 30 is the best thing to ever happen to my 20’s.
2. Marrying Kim was one of my more intelligent decisions.
3. My weight is still in the mid 220’s.
4. While I feel like my creative input could have been stronger for the final product, I am excited to have helped create an album with Brett and I am really thrilled that people are listening to it.
5. I have been a gigging fool so far this Summer and I love it. Played a couple of shows with Billy Thompson who is a fabulous guitarist and band leader and a really great guy. Probably have some more with him later, doing a gig this weekend with my pal Geoff Logan, and I sense more and more on the horizon.
6. Because I have been getting paid for these shows I am feeling like the new bass amp will be have more than 1/2 way paid for itself before the Fall (and that is a highly conservative estimation, it may pay for itself completely if this momentum keeps up).
7. The Kabuti is always a good time.
8. Greg at Local Heroes has got me hooked on a comic called 100 Bullets and I freaking love it. Look it up but don’t read too much, Wikipedia explains the whole twisted scenario and it will ruin it for you if you read it all there.
9. Work could be better, but things are looking up for the company. I don’t know if its a blessing or a curse. I guess its a blessing for the moment.
10. Joe’s new camera is outta control and its exciting when he uploads photos one at a time because I know he’s hoarding some good shots.